The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘Yes, I feel sure I might. And yet you would deal harshly with the privileges of others, if they happened not to accord with your own?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Joel asked him, easily, tolerantly, more inclined for amusement than anger. ‘Surely – if it came to it – wouldn’t anybody? Take the Corn Law, for instance. The Duke of Wellington and his associates, the Dalbys and the Floods and the rest of them, are farmers – corn growers – and who am I to blame them for wanting to keep the foreign corn out and their own profits high? I’d do the same if I stood in their shoes. But from where I stand, I want the foreign corn in, so that my operatives can afford to eat without pestering me for higher wages. So I have to support Lord Grey. He’s likely to give me what I want not because he cares about my wages bill but because he wants the Duke of Wellington’s job. That’s what it comes down to – not so much conviction as common sense. They may cut each other’s throats at Westminster any day they please, but what I do believe in – most sincerely – is that I shall take good care they don’t cut mine.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Crispin said, smiling too. ‘I think we may all rest assured as to the continued good health of your throat. And I admire your honesty, at least, Mr Barforth. You don’t pretend to hold any deep political conviction, or any kind of conviction at all as some do.’

  But this was too much for Morgan Aycliffe, who, suspecting his own convictions – or supposed lack of them – to be under attack, suddenly inserted himself into the conversation like a knife blade, too angry now for good manners, driven most painfully against his will to break his lifelong commandment that Aycliffe linen, dirty or otherwise, should only be washed in the strictest privacy.

  ‘There will be no universal suffrage,’ he hissed, as if it were an entirely personal matter, a misdemeanour of Crispin’s he was determined to put a stop to. ‘It is an indecency – a madman’s dream.’

  And the locking of eyes, the clash of wills began again.

  ‘I believe you are wrong, sir.’

  ‘I believe I am right.’

  ‘That is your privilege.’

  ‘What right has a man to say how a country should be governed unless he has property in it?’

  ‘Because he is a man, sir. And because government should be concerned with people, not exclusively with possessions. Because we are Christians, sir, or profess to be, and have learned about brotherhood.’

  ‘Easy to say, my lad, when you possess nothing and never show yourself in chapel.’

  ‘As you say, sir.’

  And as Crispin walked across to the decanter to refill his glass, Morgan Aycliffe threw at him, in that hideous whisper, ‘And you drink, boy – you drink.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Crispin said coolly. ‘So I do.’ And raising his glass to his outraged parent, he saluted him, smiled, and drank it down.

  ‘I am not well,’ Elinor said, scrambling to her feet. ‘Mr Aycliffe, I am not at all – as I should be. Oh dear, oh dear – Verity, will you come upstairs with me? I am not well.’

  Although her interruption was timely and she did indeed appear very much out of sorts, her husband did no more than give her his permission to withdraw, showing no disposition at all to comfort her.

  I did not expect to see Crispin Aycliffe again so very soon, for it was not his habit to pay polite calls or take tea with ladies, but the following afternoon brought him to my drawing room, a rueful smile on his lips and his air that of a naughty schoolboy who can usually wheedle his way back into anyone’s good graces.

  ‘I am come to make my apologies, Mrs Barforth.’

  ‘I wish you would not. There is no need.’ ‘I think there must be. Can you deny that I behaved badly?’

  ‘Oh – quite badly – very badly, if you like. But if you had good reasons – if it helped – then it doesn’t matter.’

  And when he began to say something, hesitated, and then seemed unwilling to continue, I said quickly, ‘I was not offended. I am not going to pretend otherwise. And that is the end of it. May I give you some tea?’

  ‘No – no, thank you – no tea. But if I may sit with you a while – for the polite interval…?’

  And already I knew that if he never took another step towards me but remained on the edge of the blue satin chair, a yard away, he was still too close.

  ‘Is my cousin Elinor quite recovered?’

  ‘I have not seen her today. She must have remained upstairs.’

  But we were not talking about Elinor at all; we were simply talking, using words because only true friends – true lovers – can really be silent together, and we could be neither. Yet words do not always obey the tongue. It was certainly unwise of me, instead of making some remark about the inclement weather, to ask him, ‘Do you truly dislike your father?’

  And it was unfair of him, perhaps, to lean forward so eagerly and give me an honest answer. ‘In my better moments I do. It’s far easier, you see, to dislike him – as he dislikes me – than to feel sorry for him.’

  ‘Will you tell me why?’

  ‘I would tell you anything, Mrs Barforth. My father dislikes me for many reasons, some of them very simple. Because I am young and he is not. Because my uncle – my mother’s brother – has recently made me a small allowance – not a great deal but enough to permit me to be mildly disobedient. Because I am sinful, as he calls it, and not ashamed by it, while he is not sinful at all – since it is not sin in marriage, surely? – and is frequently alarmed by his own desires. Those are the simple reasons, but mainly, I suppose, it is because I remind him of my mother.’

  ‘And she was – she was unhappy, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh yes, quite dreadfully. I think the very foundation of my childhood was her unhappiness, for I was always aware of it. I used to hurry home from school when I was quite a little boy, convinced that something terrible had happened to her – and often enough I would find her weeping or could see that she had heard me coming and had tried to calm herself. I felt quite unable to stay away from the house for too long, in case she needed me – in case she was in danger …’

  ‘And was she in danger?’

  ‘Physical danger? No, of course not. My father is not a violent man – not with women and fine china, at any rate – and he would never have lifted a finger against her in anger. It was his disapproval she feared, and unfortunately she could do nothing right for him. In his opinion she was a most unsatisfactory woman – as I am a most unsatisfactory son – and eventually she began to believe him. She lost faith in herself, since he had none in her, and when that happened, she began to fade.’

  ‘But what did she do to displease him?’

  ‘Oh, a hundred little things that his eyes magnified out of all proportion – the incorrect arrangement of his vases, a glove left on a chair, a careless word, so that eventually she would hardly open her mouth in his presence. She was, I think, naturally high-spirited, even a little scatterbrained, rather like your cousin Elinor, except that she lacked Elinor’s resilience, Elinor’s tough Barforth fibre. She was warmhearted and sensitive and perhaps not too brave. Her spirit bruised easily, you see, and my father found her unhappiness insulting. He could not admit that it stemmed from him. There had to be another reason, and so he decided she was not well, an invalid prone to odd fancies. He isolated her from old friends and from the possibility of making new ones; he isolated her most luxuriously, but it was a prison just the same – and so, in a way, he suffocated her. He gave her everything he believed she ought to have, except light and air, and so she withered. And he was angry with her, so angry that she withered even more. He was angry the day she died, and so was I. I still am. There’s no more to it than that, except that I, too, find it hard to breathe in his atmosphere.’

  ‘And what will you do? Will you go away again?’

  ‘Oh, I hardly think so,’ he said with a forced nonchalance, his familiar, sardonically arched brow. ‘How could I possibly be spared now that my father is acquiring a taste for the political life, which has never been che
ap. He will need me to keep a sharp eye on his interests – and even on his wife – while he is away at Westminster. No, no, my father needs me, and I am very good, you know, at my profession. I believe I know how to squeeze together more human souls per acre than any other man in the Law Valley, which may not have been the purpose of my architectural studies abroad but is certainly most financially rewarding. My cottages may fall down in a year or two, I admit, and I have never pretended, even to the poor devils who have to live in them, that I could not do better. But they are cheap, you see – unsanitary, ugly, but cheap. And our profit margin is very high.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why? Because I’m ashamed of my work? Yes, I am ashamed of it – it’s the same feeling my father has, I suppose, every time he feels the urge to get into bed with his wife, which is perhaps one of the reasons I pity him.’

  ‘Mr Aycliffe, I don’t think you should—’

  ‘No, of course I should not speak to you like that – not to a lady – a lovely lady – but you understand me, Mrs Barforth. Don’t you?’

  And because I did, because I could feel my heart pounding, the air entering and leaving my lungs, because. I could hear the stirrings of that uncomfortable identity inside me which claimed the right to hope and feel – to comfort this man if I wanted to comfort him, to say, ‘Yes, I understand. Go on. Share your pain with me. Let it create a bond between us. And then, when it doesn’t hurt any longer, who knows?’ Because of that, I knew it was time to send him away. All my choices had been made for me, long ago, by others. I had no rights, no personal hopes, I was the wife of my husband, the mother of my children; I could have no identity beyond that, and I must tell him so.

  But, after all, it seemed he did not need to be reminded, for he got up, clearly preparing to take his leave, and I got up, too, nervously extending a hand.

  ‘Once again you will have to forgive me,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I am too sensitive to climate – I see a great deal of misery around me, in those fine new slums I have created, and I tend to absorb too much of it. Mrs Barforth, did you know that my father once spoke to yours, or perhaps to your grandfather, about a marriage settlement between you and me?’

  ‘Yes – yes, I knew—’

  ‘And that I – because it was my father who had proposed it – turned sulky and would not agree to meet you … No, you couldn’t know that, nor how bitterly I regret—’

  ‘Mr Aycliffe.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Barforth.’

  I could not, for a moment, remember the, words which meant ‘I think you had better go’ and, remembering, found, my tongue heavy and awkward when I forced it to speak.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you are right. I will leave at once – naturally—’

  And when he had gone I sat down, folded my hands, closed my eyes, and sought for silence with immense determination.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I did not wish to see Crispin Aycliffe again, of that I was very certain, but to avoid him would not only have appeared odd, it would have meant avoiding Elinor, too. And since her pregnancy was not going as it should, I continued to call at Blenheim Lane and so continued to meet him there, and elsewhere, and to show him the neutral civility of caution, the preservation of oneself from unnecessary pain.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Barforth,’ he would say to me. ‘Are you well?’ And I would answer, just as coolly, ‘Very well, thank you. And you?’ And that was all.

  But Elinor, sickly and depressed – fanciful, as her husband had begun to call her – aware, perhaps, that he no longer gazed at her quite as he used to, was inclined to blame Crispin for all her ills and would greet me every day with some fresh example of his spite.

  I would find her, more often than not, in her bedroom, curled up on a sofa surrounded by the lotions and potions of sickness, the odds and ends of idleness with which her husband had forbidden her to clutter his drawing room. Her hair would be hanging girlishly down her back, her thickening body hidden, as best she could, in a swathe of lace and frills, and before I had taken off my bonnet, her tale of woe would begin.

  ‘Well, and I am glad to see you, for no one has even glanced at me the whole morning. They brought me my tea and toast at nine o’clock and since then I could have died and would have been quite cold by now. Yes, and I am obliged to sit up here because he fears my medicine glass may spill over on his carpet or that I shall put it down on his satinwood table and it will leave a ring … And if I am not well enough to go downstairs tonight, will he come and sit with me? Yes, when he’s eaten his dinner and read his paper and quarrelled with his son – yes, and when he does come in he’ll straighten all the bottles on my table and tidy up my books and my needlework before he even asks me how I am. And then he’ll sit like a cat on hot bricks, without a word to say about anything but that abominable young man. It’s Crispin’s fault. It’s Crispin who makes him so nervous, and if I lose this child and myself with it, then I shall know who to blame. Oh, there was such a set-to the other night, Verity, and right outside my bedroom door, in the corridor where everyone could hear them. He had come home very late – indeed I think it was almost morning, for it was quite light – and since he has to pass this door to reach his own, my husband heard him and, oh my goodness, Verity, the things they said to each other. I suppose he was not quite sober – for my brother Joel was never sober when he came home so late, except that my father was never there to see – and my husband called him spendthrift and feckless, and then they began about the allowance he has from his uncle, and how my husband had tried to put a stop to it. And then my husband told him he was not fit to have it, since all he did was squander it on revolutionary newspapers and women of bad character. So there they were, going at it hammer and tongs, until my head ached, and I could hardly look Mrs Naylor in the eye the next morning when she brought my tea, because she must have heard them, too. He wants me to lose this child, I’m sure he does. He doesn’t want a half brother with a half share in the business. That’s why he’s always provoking me, and provoking my husband – or else he wants my husband to throw him out so he can say it was because of me, and ruin my reputation. Yes, I do believe he does, for I have heard my husband say to him a hundred times that he will not let him go. “You will stay here, boy, and do your duty until I decide your duty is done.” That’s what he tells him. Oh dear, what an odious creature he is. And to think that when I was younger and didn’t understand things so well, I wondered if he might marry Hannah. I used to think any husband was better than none, but I’d have her stay single all her life before I’d see her take him.’

  But Hannah had made some slight arrangements of her own, Ramsden Street Chapel having acquired a new minister that year, a square, plain-looking man of thirty-five, red-haired and most distressingly freckled but more than ready to appreciate Hannah’s administrative talents. At about the same time, on a visit to my mother, she had made the acquaintance of the new incumbent of Patterswick Church, a pale, rather beautiful young man who, experiencing some difficulty in communicating with his parishioners – his accent being vastly different from theirs – had been most grateful for Hannah’s advice. And so, between the two of them – the forceful Methodist Mr Brand and the beautiful, timid Anglican Mr Ashley – her days, somewhat to my relief, were full.

  ‘She won’t marry them,’ Elinor told me. ‘It’s Ashley she likes best and Brand she thinks she ought to like best, and so she’ll hover between the two and miss them both. And really, one wonders, isn’t that the best part – the courting, when you’re always nice to each other and you’ve got your own bed to go home to? Ah well, if I die having this baby she can marry Morgan Aycliffe after all – if it’s legal.’

  But, towards the end of November and the sparkling, frosty beginning of December, there were times when she decided she might well live a little longer and, since her husband did not like her to appear in public once her pregnancy began to show, my services were often required.

  ‘You may go to your brother�
��s house and nowhere else,’ Mr Aycliffe told her, requesting me privately to invite no other company when she was there – for Bradley Hobhouse had sniggered the last time he had seen her in that condition and would certainly do so again – but Elinor, like Joel, would always take a yard for every inch one gave her and saw no reason to deny herself the excitement of our winter lectures on the slave trade.

  We were, of course, dedicated opponents of this pernicious traffic, both in the sugar plantations of our own dominions and the cotton plantations of America, and, to renew our enthusiasm, we would be visited from time to time by some reverend gentleman or other lately returned from the West Indies, who would regale us with all the horrors of human degradation. Sometimes there would be exhibits, bullwhips, thumbscrews, leg irons – now and again with blood still on them – and there, would be tears from most of us and indignation from us all, and Lucy Oldroyd, more often than not, would be carried outside in a dead swoon. And for a few days afterwards we would feel chastened and would count our blessings and be kind to one another, until the West Indies and America began to seem very far away and we very small, and we slipped back into our everyday selves again.

  Speakers, of course, varied. Some of them were pompous, some tedious, some downright embarrassing in their emotion or their enjoyment of the sin and shame of it all. Some were forthright and sincere; a few dwelt rather too lovingly on the fine female bodies put up naked for auction. A few like Mr Richard Oastier of Huddersfield, that great champion of Abolition, were magnificent, never to be forgotten. But whatever the quality of the oration, the experience, in the dull, grey wasteland of our northern winter, did us good, and as we arrived at Ramsden Street schoolhouse that December evening, although we had heard it all before and knew, in fact, that the battle for Abolition was almost won, excitement was not lacking.

  And perhaps Elinor was doubly content because, at the last moment, she had almost been prevented from coming at all for lack of the male escort her husband considered essential. Mr Aycliffe, who was himself a leader of the Abolitionist cause in Cullingford and who had been expected to take his accustomed place on the speaker’s platform, had been obliged, quite deliberately I thought, to cancel; while Joel, in response to Elinor’s frantic note, had merely shrugged his shoulders and gone off to his Oyster Club, a group which met supposedly for political discussion but mainly for the sampling of oysters and cold punch in the best room at the Old Swan. And having resigned myself to an evening in Blenheim Lane, making soothing murmurs to Elinor’s well-nigh continuous complainings, I had been surprised to find her dressed and smiling, standing in the hall on tiptoe with eagerness.